This paper deals with the problem of co-existence in the same
environment of agents with different attitudes towards each other.
In previous works of the same authors, agents endowed with different
help-seeking and help-giving attitudes have been defined and
simulated in a multi-agent system, and the effect of their behavior
on the global performance of the system has been measured. It has
been shown that the "social" agents, which both give and ask for
help, are the most successful, and may be able to tolerate very well
the presence of exploiters. In this paper the robustness of the
social strategy is tested by putting help-giving under risky
conditions. The following three variables have been manipulated:
number of resources available; threshold triggering the help-giving
behavior; and ratio between different kinds of exploiters and social
agents. The results show that, with a few exceptions, the social
strategy is quite robust in several risky conditions. Some
considerations about the usefulness of such a strategy for
multi-agent systems are also outlined.

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